Editorials

With the unprecedented success of Marvel's big comic book team up movie, The Avengers, its no wonder other studios are clamoring to make the same movie magic happen for them. We have heard many reports that Warner Brothers/DC will be pushing up production for a Justice League movie (and solo hero movies to lead in) and now Sony seems to want to build out the Spider-Man universe. Here is what Avi Arad had to say:

“What I’m trying to say to you without giving anything away is hopefully all these worlds will live together in peace someday.

“It’s an Eddie Brock story. We want to be as close to the comics as possible. Especially in Eddie Brock’s story. But again, pseudo-science is becoming science. All these tidbits about webs, artificial webs, is a huge industry now. Spiderwebs have unique qualities that will be huge for communications, fibers, and so forth. So we have taken the approach that we want to make the huge amazing movie about Eddie.

“He was a journalist. He had the wrong story, he got in trouble for it, he got fired. The whole essence to us for the Marvel characters. Stay close to the bible, stay close to the emotional story, and the rest is fun.”

Well Avi that's all fine and good but I think you are missing the ultimate point of building out your universe. While Venom is a great character and I would love to see him on screen done correctly this doesn't really make much sense. First off, how would you create Venom without Spider-Man as a central player? You can't have an Eddie Brock story without Peter Parker. The two characters are so entwined. The symbiote's story literally starts with Spider-Man, are they planning on ignoring that fact? The notion of talking about making an anti-hero movie is very cool. However, in the world of comic books this is really difficult. While I would love to watch a movie just about The Joker and his antics most people would not. The Joker is nothing without Batman. To have a character be on screen who's main adversary is a hero as iconic as Spider-Man would not work well. You would be essentially making Spider-Man the villain when he was just the hero in The Amazing Spider-Man, that makes no sense to me.

If they want to make Venom apart of the rebooted Spider-Man universe just give him a proper introduction and make him work with Spider-Man from time to time as he does in the comics. Trying to shoe horn him in as some kind of half ass hero way will turn out confusing to most movie goers. None of Spidey's villains need their own movie, just give us The Amazing Spider-Man with the Lizard, and let the sequels build to Spider-Man taking on the Sinister Six. That's how you expand the universe, properly. We don't need Sony to do a hero team up...a villain team up is what we want to see in the Spider-Man universe. In order to capture that magic that The Avengers had you need to be bold and different. Having your hero take on six amazing villains would be very bold indeed.